Manobo

The Manobo, the hispanicized form of their endonym Manuvu, meaning the native-grown people, are a cluster of indigenous peoples in Mindanao. They speak Manobo languages of the Austronesian family and lived by shifting rice cultivation, hunting and river trade in villages led by datus, keeping an animist religion of ancestor and forest spirits.

While the Manobo held the interior, the coast of Agusan was dominated by the Indianized rajahnate of Butuan, a gold-trading port whose balangay ships carried tribute missions to the Song court from 1001. Spanish accounts say the Manobo and Mandaya highlanders lay outside the rajah's authority and often fought coastal towns.

Legazpi assigned Butuan as an encomienda in 1571, and Jesuits opened a mission there in 1596. Beyond the settlements, riverine Manobo communities kept their autonomy and forest economy through centuries of Moro raiding and Spanish rule.